Developing Research Excellence and Methods

I was alerted to this blog posting by Andy Burkhardt Information Literacy In An Age Of Networked Knowledge  in it there is a visual note by Howard Rheingold who I hadn't heard of but I liked his visual note, it caught my eye. I think visual images are good at this and stay with us a lot longer than text. What I liked about this note was that it would strike a cord with those interested in information literacy, digital literacy, networks, the net.

In the posting there was also a mention about David Weinberger’s (someone else I hadn't heard of) new book Too Big To Know. Which according to Andy it’s about how “knowledge and expertise are becoming networks, and are taking on the properties of networks”  - sounds interesting.

Andy discusses both the note and the book and finishes of by saying that

we’re not just trying to teach students to become successful academic researchers. We are trying to help them become sophisticated consumers and creators of information. This is a much bigger view that encompasses student’s critical thinking skills, lifelong learning and the future of the web.

I firmly believe in lifelong learning and know that my knowledge and experience have been informed by own learning, which is an ongoing process and my network of colleagues and friends. 

Just a brief update on activity on supporting the mobile library community project. 

We are currently testing a community site with a group of beta testers and using this to publish case studies from libraries using mobile technologies in innovative ways. We plan to continue to collect both case studies and guest blog posts throughout the course of the project.

We've also organised an information sharing event to be held in Birmingham in May - we initially opened 50 places but this sold out in less than 24 hrs! We currently have a large waitlist and unfortunately won't be able to offer places to everyone for this event but it's good to know that there is demand for such events and we are now hoping to see if we can organise more events. 

I'll post more updates as the project progresses.

Attended Hazel's inaugural professional lecture on Thursday - 'What's so social about informatics?'. It was as I expected informative and entertaining as she used examples from her personal and professional life to demonstrate that information is very social. Lots of socializing went on after as people chatted and caught up with ex colleagues and friends from Queen Margaret University. All part of Hazel's network.

Gunilla's Friday afternoon presentation on Social information research attracted smaller numbers but for those that did attend it was thought provoking as she explored what 'social information' is. A topic which a publisher had asked her and a colleague to co- edit a book on. Their first task was to determine what exactly is social information - something which they are still struggling to define. Different aspects were explored and several of the aspects will be covered in the forthcoming book to be published by Emerald this Autumn 2012.